From Blackhole to Multiverse
Stage 1
Late Eighties till mid-Nineties; a hiatus in my life. A period that I would gladly forget. The universe I had felt _ even if grudgingly_ anchored in had just factually disappeared, almost in the blink of an eye, as if time itself had imploded. I was unhinged, anchor-less and adrift; easy meat for the winds and human and institutional kicks that inevitably followed, once even literally. And it led me to the most unsuited places to seek refuge in some kind of urban post-industrial muckraking smudgy corners of Kreuzberg, in what was then West Berlin, especially its nightlife. It was a piss hole of a refuge; communication was the sullen “Null Bock” monosyllables that would have made Kleist jump out in torture out of his grave. Facial expressions equally dictated by the “alternative underground scene” were sour scowls; even the dogs seemed to have been primed in some subtle Pavlovian way to reflect the general morbidity. And seeking solace amidst even more alienated and kicked-around souls was a futile labor. It only increased my sense of emptiness and loneliness.
The bands and the music were industrial junk.
Sketching some scenes in these odd places; I did end up with this big oild painting.
Stage 2
Almost a decade later I wanted to forget it all.
Whitewash this painting, as if to bury a decade, which I truly believe I had lost, feeling as if it had been stolen from me, a part of my youth, although I was over thirty.
Yes, it was the black hole.
And I wanted it to be a black hole. The geometrical universal representation of something not just physically, but also cortical-endocrine real.
And so I went for it…
But then the partly pastos oil remnants of the old painting disturbed me. Not only did I want to whitewash the old, but also the remains of the weighty elements on the canvas. I would, in fact, end up changing the canvas. A new canvas on an old frame.
Stage 3
Months turned to years.
And viola, as I got back to it after almost two years, it did not appear important anymore; in fact, the whole decade was no longer haunting me. The blackhole had already become a faded memory and seemed to have lost its sucking grip. Perhaps I had already sublimely worked it over, and I felt the canvas needed colors, brightness, and light that seemed to have imperceptibly entered again into my life. No less than the consequence of the dedicated support, almost bordering on caring and love, that my friends and colleagues, many of them from the former GDR, almost unconditionally blessed me with. The dispelled blackness and the bright colors are, in a way, also a tribute to them!
No wonder it blossomed into what you see now. A colorful Multiverse!
